Progress Update - Patch Live

satoru wrote:

Ultimately that feels more like a design problem than an issue with the tech tree itself

As Sid says you should be making 'interesting decisions' at each point. I think though you can end up in situations where tech A is useful for a particular situation/race but not another. In that sense that tech  is not 'useless' in general, but simply useless in that situation. Simialrly 'must have' tech should be situational in theory.

If we're talking in an absolute sense of 'must have' then that's more an issue with the tech itself and possibly where it is in the tree and such.

Well, if you look at EL, in order ro beat an educated player or a serious+ AI you need to do right things at the right time. There is time to grow your army, time to boost your economy, time to go to war.  Variability comes from where you are at the map, who is your neighbor. Sometimes you go early war, sometimes you have good resources around, sometimes you're stuck on an island and sometimes you're a Cultist and your closest neighbor is Drakken. 

ES has the same kind of variability. Whether your neighbor is a Craver or your nearby territories being bought out by Lumeris you've got to go a specific way based on the random of your spawn conditions. Say I have a neighbor Craver, then I have to go full defence mode yet I must obtain some resources  and build good enough economy to sustain my early big fleet. How am I going to accomplish all that if I have to go through a tech tree? If there are unskippable technologies that I don't need at the time? 

Amazing news!

Love the new tech tree, or rather tech umbrella. ;)

All good! There's been plenty of great games to play in the meantime.

Keep working hard and keep up the good work!

Hope you guys have a happy holidays!

Very happy you guys decided to give us some heads up on what the deal is, how things are, etc. I look forward to more crazy fun in the future. Best of luck with the AI changes.

stn1 wrote:

DevildogFF wrote:
The tech tree is awesome and I'm glad we can talk about it now! Looks like it will be a great return/iteration of the ES1 tech tree and I think we can all agree that it will be a better system.

Great job, guys and gals

I hope we won't need to take useless techs in order to get must-have ones, that was the biggest problem of ES1 tech tree. It had almost zero variability. 

Ultimately that feels more like a design problem than an issue with the tech tree itself

As Sid says you should be making 'interesting decisions' at each point. I think though you can end up in situations where tech A is useful for a particular situation/race but not another. In that sense that tech  is not 'useless' in general, but simply useless in that situation. Simialrly 'must have' tech should be situational in theory.

If we're talking in an absolute sense of 'must have' then that's more an issue with the tech itself and possibly where it is in the tree and such.

Good luck with the new tech tree. It certainly looks interesting, but I hope it promotes decisions.  I think the current tree isn't bad (there's a lot of must haves, but hte order you acquire them in matters, and in era 2 you sorta have to pick which you're getting), but I'd really like to generally not feel forced into "industry booster, food booster, science booster" for my open most games. 

Still great to see progress and I'm really happy to hear you're trying new things with the AI, even if its a pain in the ass.

It all looks so wonderful. iv tried playing the new update but i keep getting and failure and error notice? dose any one else have this? 

Great job, thanks for the update and the extra insight on what was actually going on!

Kinda impatient to see whats next, tech tree looks promising and i'm looking forward to the space battle improvements.

Thank you very much for the update! The regular communication is very much appreciated. Try not to work yourselves too hard though. If you need a bit longer to get things up to a standard you're happy with I'm sure everyone here will understand!

stn1 wrote:
Well, if you look at EL, in order ro beat an educated player or a serious+ AI you need to do right things at the right time. There is time to grow your army, time to boost your economy, time to go to war.  Variability comes from where you are at the map, who is your neighbor. Sometimes you go early war, sometimes you have good resources around, sometimes you're stuck on an island and sometimes you're a Cultist and your closest neighbor is Drakken.

ES has the same kind of variability. Whether your neighbor is a Craver or your nearby territories being bought out by Lumeris you've got to go a specific way based on the random of your spawn conditions. Say I have a neighbor Craver, then I have to go full defence mode yet I must obtain some resources  and build good enough economy to sustain my early big fleet. How am I going to accomplish all that if I have to go through a tech tree? If there are unskippable technologies that I don't need at the time? 

I never felt that any techs in ES1 were unneeded. To build better economic buildings you need better industry; to get all that fast enough you need better science; you also need more planets if you want to be more focused in your area; to handle worse planets you need better approval buildings. There's hardly an unneeded tech, and you shouldn't expect to research best in class modules without any prerequisites - it undermines, if not punishes, specialisation.

I am quite sceptical about the new tech system, but I hope it will at least be an improvement over the current ill-fitting one with a lot of must-have techs and cost increase prohibiting going back in eras.

Sovereign wrote:

When can we count on the release of update 2? Christmas is at the gates so probably not before february right?

According to one of their posts, they're shooting for roughly 5-week gaps between updates. So, if everything goes according to plan, somewhere around January.

So pony can start running in circles.

Redesign of technology-tree looks very doubtful and does not fit into the current concept of science and game design. Concentric design of technology tree was relevant for the ES1,  but the concept of science's evolution in ES2  such as in the EL. Trying to cross the concept of EL (ES2) with the design ES1 - it is very, very bad idea and it looks horrible and very uncomfortable. I hope that the old design is still available.

It seems to me that this is a waste of time, while the game has a performance problem, and nasty bug with infinite pending has not yet been fixed.

I will show a flowchart of Garry Newman (DayZ), as a demonstration:

Can't wait to put my hands and brains on that tech tree! :D Thank you for the update!

CrazyFizik wrote:

It seems to me that this is a waste of time, while the game has a performance problem, and nasty bug with infinite pending has not yet been fixed.

The infinite pending turns should be fixed now. Please update your game and let us know if you encounter any further endless turn issues.

After just reading this blog, i want to thank you for any substantial update at all. This scratches that information itch. I love the redesign of the tech tree, much more ES1, exactly along the lines i want to see.

Keep up the good work. I can't wait to see the new tech tree...

Love the look of the new tech tree.  Hope it will be as complex and diverse as possible.  Now to the patched game!

This is awesome! Thank you for improving update 1. You could simply fix everything in update 2 but you decide not to wait till its release and give us a patch! 

I am sorry but what actually planet grid is?

Awesome to hear that you got around the blocks. It's amazing how something which seems like a straight path can very quickly turn into a knee-deep swamp. :)

Thanks for the update.

SefDeka wrote:

This is awesome! Thank you for improving update 1. You could simply fix everything in update 2 but you decide not to wait till its release and give us a patch! 

I am sorry but what actually planet grid is?

The planet grid describes the different types of planets and how they relate to each other. There have been some suggestions to change it which have been taken up by the devs.

See https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/66-game-design/thread/22124-rework-the-planet-grid-issues-with-planet-climates-fidsi-and-terraforming

and the associated idea https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/ideas/2-rework-the-entire-planet-grid.

AquaticSonarKey wrote:

Love the look of the new tech tree.  Hope it will be as complex and diverse as possible.  Now to the patched game!

Sadly my system still ends up pending on the same turn when I use my latest functional UE save game.  

Will try to get through without doing some of the actions I took during that turn, see how that goes.    

Wish I felt motivated to restart another go-through.  Perhaps I will yet do so. 

AquaticSonarKey wrote:

AquaticSonarKey wrote:

Love the look of the new tech tree.  Hope it will be as complex and diverse as possible.  Now to the patched game!

Sadly my system still ends up pending on the same turn when I use my latest functional UE save game.  

Will try to get through without doing some of the actions I took during that turn, see how that goes.    

Wish I felt motivated to restart another go-through.  Perhaps I will yet do so. 

The fix probably does not translate to old save games.

Thanks for the update, I'm super excited to play this in few hours.

Little comment on your release process, I do think that such visible regression (infinite turn) shouldn't pass through any decent QA process. 

I hope you will be able to improve this aspect for further releases.

Btw thanks for your great games

Awesome! It sort of looks like the tech tree from ES1!

Just to make sure everybody's on the same page: Old saves will still encounter the same issues. The fixes we made require you to start a new game.  

interestingly enough, the previous saved game worked for a few turns, but did eventually crash again.

oh well.  Would say I'm excited to start from scratch, but I'm feeling apathetic about it, for now.

That will probably resolve within an hour, because I feel it's my duty to test the patch. 

;P

Wow it's really cool from you guys that you brought back the good old tech tree!

The system now is also very satisfying in my opinnion, but is really something that fits more in Endless Legend than in Endless Space :)

And can't wait for MP! Me and my friend are ready for hours to come in an ES2 Party

Great job, guys and gals!

Time to start another game from scratch  A pity i didnt get time to finish the last one but the update seems promising. 

DevildogFF wrote:
The tech tree is awesome and I'm glad we can talk about it now! Looks like it will be a great return/iteration of the ES1 tech tree and I think we can all agree that it will be a better system.

Great job, guys and gals

I hope we won't need to take useless techs in order to get must-have ones, that was the biggest problem of ES1 tech tree. It had almost zero variability. 

stn1 wrote:

DevildogFF wrote:
The tech tree is awesome and I'm glad we can talk about it now! Looks like it will be a great return/iteration of the ES1 tech tree and I think we can all agree that it will be a better system.

Great job, guys and gals

I hope we won't need to take useless techs in order to get must-have ones, that was the biggest problem of ES1 tech tree. It had almost zero variability. 

Agreed. But it looks like that it's not the case here. At least I'm not seeing any lines in between newer and earlier techs.

stn1 wrote:

I hope we won't need to take useless techs in order to get must-have ones, that was the biggest problem of ES1 tech tree. It had almost zero variability. 

Well, that's a problem with most 4X games that use linear trees and branches with prerequisite techs. Maybe we can skip around a bit more in this one.

I do like this new layout better than the original EL-style tech menu. It's easier for me to plan ahead. With the EL-style tech trees, it's harder to think in terms of a consistent plan for tech development that carries across the different eras.